Mistakes and the opportunity for growth

There’s a difference between mistakes and negligence.

Negligence is where the proper care has not been taken. In cases where negligence puts people or assets at risk, or when behaviour is knowingly wide of the expected standards, then this is clearly a serious issue that needs acting upon.

Mistakes, on the other hand, are where someone has take their best guess, or tried something, and it turned out to be misguided or wrong. Mistakes don’t lack care, they just lack the right data or judgement. We all make mistakes. Mistakes are part and parcel of work.

There are three ways your team or organisation can deal with mistakes: attach blame to them, ignore them or learn from them.

Attaching blame to mistakes is unkind.

Making someone feel guilt or shame about something they’ve probably tried hard to get right only leads to lower morale and a culture of fear. When people are scared to make mistakes, people learn to stop taking guesses, so it slows down everything until there’s enough data to make a perfect decision rather than them trying a best guess. It stifles innovation because people are afraid to try new things, and it encourages people to see their team as a group of individual missions rather than a collective who have each others' backs.

Mistakes aren’t ideal. They’re the proof that something could be done better than it was done. And that’s an opportunity to get improve. When we ignore mistakes, we are telling a bigger story: that average is OK, that we’re OK with denying people the opportunities to grow, that we’re not as committed to our mission as we say we are.

But when we learn from mistakes, we grow. The kind thing to do is to separate the mistake from the person who made it, and use the mistake as an opportunity not just for personal growth but for team growth too. Interrogating what went wrong is where we get the best data so that it goes right next time, and it allows us to continuously improve.

The best leaders create a safe space to make mistakes.

This is the essence of psychological safety. By being kind but rigorous, we get to couch potentially bruising interrogations of mistakes with a warmth and generosity that makes them safe enough to bear. We may even celebrate mistakes, because they show us how often we get it right, and remind us that we're human after all. And in doing so, we foster more creativity, a healthier appetite for risk and a mindset that pushes us forward by saying that whilst we don’t need to get everything right, that we sure as hell will try our best to.

So my question this week is this:

Are your team mostly blaming, ignoring or learning from mistakes?

And how can you all do more of the latter?